RBS investment bank chairman Rory Cullinan to leave lender

MaxColchester

DavidWighton

The chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC’s investment bank, Rory Cullinan, will leave the lender next month after a disagreement over the bank’s strategy, the bank said in a statement Monday.

Cullinan, an RBS
RBS, +0.26%
veteran, decided to step down after falling out with the bank’s management, in particular its chief financial officer, over how to execute a plan to cut back its corporate and investment bank, according to people familiar with the matter. Cullinan, who was only appointed to his new role last month, didn’t answer calls for comment. RBS said that he will leave the bank on April 30 but declined to comment on the nature of the fallout or make CFO Ewen Stevenson available for comment.

The departure is a blow for the lender, which is 80% owned by the government, as it has lost a number of senior executives in recent years. Cullinan, one of RBS’s longest-serving executives, was one of the lender’s few top managers to be granted a bonus after successfully winding down a large chunk of the lender’s so-called bad bank last year. In February, RBS said Cullinan would be put in charge of scaling back its investment bank to focus more on its U.K. client base.

RBS’s plans include exiting corporate- and investment-banking operations in about two dozen locations including Hong Kong and Australia. The bank will retain only London, Stamford, Conn., and Singapore for full-service sales and trading, which will mainly serve Western European companies and financial firms.

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